[Gallery Walk] Painted the Unfading on an Erasable Chalkboard

Gallery Hyundai, Myunghee Kim Solo Exhibition "Deep Time"

Vanished Villages and Lives in Motion... Painted on the Chalkboard of an Abandoned School

How a Life Between New York and Chuncheon Becomes Painting

A chalkboard is not an object meant to preserve. It is a surface created to be written on, erased, and written on again. Myunghee Kim drew what should not be erased on it: a forest reflected on water, children of an abandoned school, faces after the war, news of bombings heard long ago, and the passage of one person between New York and Chuncheon.

Myeonghee Kim, After the War, 2024, Oil Pastel on Blackboard, 115.5 × 176.5 cm. Gallery Hyundai

The opening scene of Myunghee Kim's solo exhibition "Deep Time," currently on view at Gallery Hyundai's new building, is quiet. A black forest hangs on a white wall. Strictly speaking, it is not the forest itself, but the forest reflected in water. The trees do not rise from the ground but descend below the surface. The sky is not above, but within the water. The landscape is inverted, and the season is mirrored. Standing before the "Chakyung" series, the viewer does not see nature, but rather a landscape that has disappeared once and returned.

The core of this exhibition is not retrospection. More than what Myunghee Kim has painted, it is about why she chose to paint on a chalkboard. While canvas promises preservation, a chalkboard presumes erasure. As a base for a painting meant to last, it is unstable. Yet Myunghee Kim’s work begins precisely on this uneasy surface. In 1990, she discovered a chalkboard in an abandoned school in Naepyeong-ri, Chuncheon. Due to the construction of the Soyang River Dam, the village was submerged and the school was left vacant. The chalkboard in a classroom emptied of children had transformed from a tool of learning to an artifact of time.

On that chalkboard, the artist drew forests. She drew wildflowers. She drew trees reflected in water. Although the forests in her paintings seem to depict nature, with a closer look they more closely resemble a place’s way of surviving. A tree reflected in water is not a real tree. But it is not entirely an illusion either. Like a vanished village or a person who has left, it remains, but not in its original place. Myunghee Kim’s landscapes are spaces for such things.

Myunghee Kim, Kimchi Making Day 2025, 2025, oil pastel on blackboard, LCD monitor, 119 × 297.5 cm. Gallery Hyundai

In her artist’s note, she writes, "I reread Tao Yuanming’s Four Seasons. Spring is not the season of pear blossoms, but the day grass sprouts through the snow. Summer is the day the wilderness opens, and autumn is the time to prepare to return within the fence." It is not the four seasons of a settler, but of a person on the move. That is why her forests are not idyllic. They are beautiful, but not comforting. The seasons floating on the water are always trembling, and the reflected trees can break at any moment.

Going up to the second floor, the blackness of the chalkboard becomes even heavier. The children in "Fountain Play" run between streams of water. Some are laughing brightly, others have turned their backs. At first glance, it is a scene of summer play. However, because the background is a chalkboard, this play appears as an afterimage left behind after an old lesson. The children seem to still be running, but in reality, they belong to an afternoon that has already disappeared. Myunghee Kim’s oil pastels capture light, but that light comes alive only on the dark surface of the chalkboard. Brightness is not the result of erasing darkness, but rather a trace barely perched atop it.

"After the War" pushes this trace even further. Children holding flowers are lined up in a row. It looks like a celebration, or perhaps a commemorative photograph. Yet, above them, physics formulas flow. These are not the mathematics written on a classroom chalkboard, but the language of science and violence that has shaped the world since the war. The children’s faces are not bright. Though they hold flowers, the flowers do not cover everything. Even after the war has ended, the world leaves formulas above the children’s heads.

Myeonghee Kim, artist. Courtesy of Gallery Hyundai.

This is where Myunghee Kim’s paintings diverge from mere nostalgia. She paints vanished villages and children, but does not confine them to the sentimentality of a lost hometown. The problem she has long grappled with is that of lives displaced from their places. This is also why New York and Chuncheon, Korea and the United States, abandoned schools and exhibition halls, housework and world maps, children’s play and the formulas of war all overlap within a single frame. People may appear to stay in one place, but the times constantly move them. Myunghee Kim accumulated the traces of such movement on the chalkboard.

That is why her paintings often contain "pictures within pictures." Behind a kitchen scene is an old document, within a self-portrait are a mirror and a map, and a still painting contains a video. A single frame does not hold only a single time. Behind the body of a woman doing housework is a world map, and above groups of children, the formulas of war pass by. Everyday life is not trivial, and history is not distant. In Myunghee Kim’s paintings, both are written on the same chalkboard.

At this point, the chalkboard is not a simple material. It is a way of understanding the world. On a chalkboard, there is the time of learning, the time of erased sentences, and the time after the children have left. In the case of an abandoned school’s chalkboard, one more layer is added: the time when an entire village disappeared. Through this single object, Myunghee Kim evokes an individual’s life, the compression of modern Korean history, women’s labor, and the movement of the world. A single precise object can go further than a grand theory.

Exhibition view of Myunghee Kim's 'Deep Time', Gallery Hyundai.

Thus, the exhibition title "Deep Time" may sound slow, but it is not soft. This time is not one of quiet meditation. It is time that remains even after being erased. Like trees reflected in water, chalkboards in abandoned schools, and the faces of children after the war, it does not completely disappear but moves to another surface. Myunghee Kim’s paintings gather what has been displaced and place them together once again.

When you leave the exhibition, the color black lingers. Normally, black is the color of absence. But Myunghee Kim’s black chalkboard is not empty. It is the color left after being written on and erased too many times. A chalkboard is something that is erased every day. On it, Myunghee Kim depicted how long what has been erased can endure. The exhibition runs until June 14.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.